The present volume collects selected papers arising from lectures delivered by the authors at the School on Fuzzy Logic and Soft Computing held during the years 1996/97/98/99 and sponsored by the Salerno University. The authors contributing to this volume agreed with editors to write down, to enlarge and, in many cases, to rethink their original lectures, in order to offer to readership, a more compact presentation of the proposed topics. The aim of the volume is to offer a picture, as a job in progress, of the effort that is coming in founding and developing soft computing's techniques. The volume contains papers aimed to report on recent results containing genuinely logical aspects of fuzzy logic. The topics treated in this area cover algebraic aspects of Lukasiewicz Logic, Fuzzy Logic as the logic of continuous t-norms, Intuitionistic Fuzzy Logic. Aspects of fuzzy logic based on similar ity relation are presented in connection with the problem of flexible querying in deductive database. Departing from fuzzy logic, some papers present re sults in Probability Logic treating computational aspects, results based on indishernability relation and a non commutative version of generalized effect algebras. Several strict applications of soft computing are presented in the book. Indeed we find applications ranging among pattern recognition, image and signal processing, evolutionary agents, fuzzy cellular networks, classi fication in fuzzy environments. The volume is then intended to serve as a reference work for foundational logico-algebraic aspect of Soft Computing and for concrete applications of soft computing technologies.
